2of3Robert Robbins, head of Texas Medical Center, has a vision of collaboration.Photo: Mayra Beltran, Staff

3of3The Texas Medical Center, with downtown Houston in the distance. One of a kind in the world, the center has 54 member institutions.Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Staff

Why would a guy like Robert Robbins take a job running the world's largest parking facility? Before he moved to Texas last fall, Robbins, 55, did stem-cell research, and was chair of Stanford University's department of cardiothoracic surgery and the head of its heart-research institute. He seemed destined to lead a university or medical school - and not, you'd think, to become president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center, the nonprofit corporation that handles parking garages, chilled water and infrastructure for its 54 members.

Robbins, though, sees a bigger game for the Texas Medical Center: To thrive in the modern world of medical research, he says, the medical center's hyper-competitive, famously feud-prone institutions must learn to play nice.

And maybe the Texas Medical Center corporation can provide them a playground. Why not, he asks, create a place where people from different institutions can work on shared interests? A place like San Francisco's Mission Bay or Boston's Kendall Square? There would be a new, walkable campus of buildings where researchers from different institutions could collaborate on shared interests, ringed by a lively mix of student housing, office buildings and the stuff of everyday life - movie theaters, restaurants, barber shops and dry cleaners.

A place like that could transform not just the Medical Center and the South Main area, but all of Houston. "Houston could become the world's life sciences leader," he says, "just as it's the leader in energy."

A: I grew up as a poor country boy in south Mississippi, in a little town, and went to a small liberal arts school, Millsap, which is in Jackson. And then medical school at the University of Mississippi. Went off to Columbia University, and did research at the National Institute of Health. I went to Stanford to study cardiothoracic surgery, then joined its faculty. I thought I'd never leave. It's a wonderful place.

But I was really intrigued by this job. There is no place like the Texas Medical Center. It is unique. There's nothing like it in Beijing, Singapore, London, Boston, San Francisco or New York.

Q: How so?

A: Because of its size. Because of the number of institutions that comprise the Texas Medical Center.

Its chilled water facility is the largest in world. Its medical laundry is the largest medical laundry in world. We run the largest parking operation in the world: No. 2 is Chicago O'Hare Airport.

We have 7,000 hospital beds, and more than 7 million patient visits a year. Our members include household names: M.D. Anderson, Texas Children's, Rice University, the University of Houston. Nothing compares to it.

I was mesmerized. Growing up in Mississippi, I'd seen that anybody who could afford it - and sometimes people who couldn't - went to the Texas Medical Center. If they had cancer, the place to go was M.D. Anderson. If they had heart disease, the Texas Heart Institute.

As an outsider, I'd always thought, what an incredible collection of assets, but its potential isn't being realized. The institutions don't work together.

That's what I was hired to do: To add programmatic infrastructure, while maintaining the physical infrastructure.

Collaboration between institutions exists, but usually it's at a low level: at a postdoctoral level, or with affinity groups for things like communication. Look from an outside perspective and ask: "What are the most significant, meaningful collaborations that go on in the Texas Medical Center?" The answer is, "There are none."

There's nothing you can point to and say, "This is a world-class, world-recognized collaborative effort that goes on between these great institutions."

Q: In fact, the Medical Center is famous for feuds.

A: Many would even argue that the greatness of Texas Medical Center happened because of intense competition between institutions. It's legendary, the fights that Dr. (Denton) Cooley and Dr. (Michael) DeBakey had while doing pioneering work in heart surgery. And it's legendary, too, the nasty public divorce between Baylor and Methodist (Hospital).

But the world has changed. I still believe individual greatness and the competitive advantage of each institution are important. But each institution has to buy into the value proposition that their competition isn't across the street, it's around the world.

That's particularly true in research and education. If you look at funding agencies - local philanthropic, foundations, state, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of Defense - all of the big grants are now being forced into collaborative efforts. More and more, the big grants - $10 million, $20 million, $30 million - are being put out as requests for proposal from multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary groups.

Q: What sorts of collaborations could happen here?

A: Early on, there are five areas I hope to focus on: health policy, regenerative medicine (stem-cell research), clinical trials, genomics and innovation.

Take clinical trials as an example. Right now, more clinical trials are done in the Texas Medical Center than in any other geographic location in the world. But each institution has its own structure, its own support staff, its own sets of paperwork. It's a perfect area to bring institutions together. If I'm a pharmaceutical company looking for places to do testing, Texas Medical Center has more patients than any other location. If we can create one-stop shopping - so that you can do trials at Methodist, DeBakey VA Medical Center, Texas Children's, Ben Taub, all with one set of paperwork - we'd increase the number of trials here by a factor of ten.

Q: What do you mean by "innovation"?

A: I mean how to turn an idea into a commercial product. Universities, schools of medicine, education facilities: It's not their mission to bring products to market. They need intellectual-property expertise. They need regulatory and financial experts. They need to recruit talent to run the company. They need to capitalize the company, to do sales and marketing, to deal with production facilities.

I've probably cured thousands of mice of heart failure using stem cells. But until we can get it into humans, commercially, it's not going to help humanity.

There are nascent groups - Bio Houston, Houston Tech Center, Gulf Coast Consortium - trying to capitalize on the intellectual capital that we have here in Houston, to keep ideas here, to fund them and commercialize them here, so the companies stay in Houston. We don't want to see them exported by venture capitalists who fly in, find ideas they like, then move the companies to Boston or the Research Triangle.

Genomics is an another area of possible cooperation that is obvious, but also daunting: Baylor, M.D. Anderson, Children's, UT (Health Science Center) - they're all good at genomics. But to compete with Boston and now New York City, they're going to have to come together in a meaningful, collaborative way. And probably they come together in a single new building.

If we're going to compete, Baylor, as great as they are, or M.D. Anderson, as great as they are, can't do it alone. It's like an All-Star team: The sum of the parts has to be greater than individual parts.

Q: With All-Star teams, it's hard to get stars to play well together.

A: Exactly. I have to be a good coach.

People generally don't play for the love of the game. They come together if it's a value-added proposition. What's in it for them?

Q: What has your reception been so far?

A: Incredibly positive. I thought I'd be here a year, 18 months, and just meet and greet, learn the culture, learn the people of Houston. But I'm already getting asked for my ideas.

There's a real desire to have a leader that could speak for all the institutions in one voice. The (Medical Center) corporation does not do education, research or health care. It's not threatening to any of the institutions. That's by our charter, by the covenants and restrictions placed on land that created the Texas Medical Center: Our mission is to promote collaborations. If an institution accepts land from us, it agrees to be good steward of land and also to collaborate and cooperate with fellow institutions.

Q: Tell me about the Innovation Zone idea.

A: The Brookings Institute identified the South Main corridor of Houston as the next hot spot for innovation in the U.S. Simultaneously, the South Main Alliance - which includes the park, the zoo, (Medical Center), Rice, Reliant Park - had a strategic planning retreat where we asked, "What do we need to do going forward?"

One of the ideas we had was to build a walking campus, the Innovation Zone research park, on Texas Medical Center land. The campus would have a building for a (Medical Center)-wide genomics institute, a building for a (Medical Center)-wide regenerative medicine institute, a building that would focus on innovation, one for health policy, one for clinical trials. And that campus would have amenities - restaurants, dry cleaners, barbers, movie theaters, housing for students - all in one place.

It would be similar to what went on with Mission Bay in San Francisco, or Kendall Square in Boston, or Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

Hopefully we could build a home for these institutes in the new South or Mid campus. If we had a little train that went back and forth from McGovern Commons, that would be cool.

My hope is that it would become like Mission Bay in San Francisco, which is ringed with commercial properties, offices for venture capitalists, intellectual property lawyers, investment bankers, regulatory experts, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, all looking to leverage the strength of this collaboration. There would also be affordable housing and green spaces …

Q: It's a good story.

A: It is a good story. It's a very entertaining story. But then you wake up in the real world and have to execute that vision.

Lisa Gray is the Houston Chronicle's acting op-ed editor. Previously, she's held many of the Chronicle's most interesting jobs: Senior editor for digital, features enterprise editor, member of the editorial board, columnist--and, most fun of all, founding editor of Gray Matters, the Chronicle site named "Best Blog" in Texas three years in a row.

Email her at lisa.gray@chron.com. Or follow her on Facebook, where she spends way too much time.